Devoted to tips and other info on how to use your Mac to read and write languages other than English

Monday, December 3, 2007

OS X 10.5 Leopard: Fixing Anjal Tamil Input

In the Apple Forums a user pointed out that Leopard's version of the Anjal Tamil Input Method has at least two bugs: the output of the combination "tr" is wrong and the em-dash is not available. Luckily Leopard's Anjal system contains two text files which users can modify to fix such things or make other customizations -- Anjal.keylayout and AnjalTransliterator.txt. You will find them in System/Library/Input Methods/TamilIM/Contents/Resources (you need to do Control + click > show package contents on the TamilIM item to get to Contents).

On my iDisk you can find a folder called "New Anjal" which has modified copies of these files to fix the two bugs mentioned. Or if I haven't got it quite right, it should not be hard to do so yourself.

9 comments:

Can you recommend a Good Tamil Software for Mac. I added all the Tamil fonts as per direction but I am unable to type Tamil. I am now using Google transliteration method and pasting it but when I paste it some of the words are not coming out right in the MS Word. Please advise. Thanks.

cgull -- You can't use Word for Mac for Tamil or any Indic script or for Arabic or Hebrew either. It just can't handle it. Use serious software like TextEdit or Pages or OpenOffice and activate the Tamil keyboards in system prefs/language & text/input sources and type away. There is no need to add any fonts. Email me if you still have problems (tom at bluesky dot org)

Actually, I have made a Tamil font and a keyboard driver based on the old typewriter keyboard layout and I CAN type in Tamil in Word for Mac with proper rendering in Tamil.I wrote to you about that before and I do not understand why you insist one cannot use Word for Mac for Tamil.